David Vining's Blog, page 27

Miquette

Henri-Georges Clouzot continues his little sojourn into the unusual, for him, with a frivolous romantic comedy. It’s fun, but very frivolous. It reminded me of Ingmar Bergman‘s own unusual entry in his filmography, Smiles of a Summer Night, a farce where everyone starts with the wrong match and ends with the right one. I might prefer it when Clouzot is doing what he’s famous for, but it’s obvious that he was more than just the French Master of Suspense.

Miquette (Daniele Delorme) is a sho...

Manon

This is a directional shift for Clouzot. His first three directed films were mystery/suspense films, but here he chose to make an updated version of the novel Manon Lescaut by Antoine François Prévost, updating the setting from the 18th century to the mid-20th and that later portions from Louisiana to Israel. It’s more of a literary drama, one that includes scenes for Clouzot to insert his strong command of suspense, but it stands out from the overall perception of his work in retrospect and...

Quai des Orfevres: A Second Look

This is one of those movies I reviewed randomly a few years ago. Loved it then. I love it again now. Clouzot’s third directed feature, it’s the first that feels fully like a Hitchcock product in French. To call it imitation would be an insult to Clouzot, I think. Clouzot was operating in similar spaces in his previous two films in more purely mystery directions. This one takes the action into the “wrong man” direction that Hitchcock had well-worn even by the late 40s when Clouzot’s exile fro...

Le Corbeau

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s second directed feature was quite controversial at the time. I remember reading that it was because it was implicitly a critique of Vichy, but everything now says that it’s because it critiqued provincials, which makes no sense to me. Well, sure, you can read a critique of provincials into it, but Parisians getting worked up because provincials are getting made fun of? Not likely. They’d be all over that. Cosmopolitans love looking down on provincials everywhere, espe...

L’assassin habite au 21

Henri-Georges Clouzot began his directing career, after a few years exclusively working as a screenwriter, with this murder mystery with comedic elements for Continental Films, a Nazi-owned film production company in Vichy France. I think it’s easy to point to a few elements as critical of the Nazi-aligned regime in France at the time, but that could always be reading in what we want to read (namely, that one of the best genre filmmakers of the 40s and 50s wasn’t pro-Nazi). Still, this first...

Henri-Georges Clouzot: A Statement of Purpose

Alfred Hitchcock once said that he had only one peer when it came to the title of Master of Suspense: Henri-Georges Clouzot.

He’s a filmmaker that I’ve had some familiarity with over the years because of the Criterion Collection’s affinity for his work. I randomly reviewed Quai des Orfevres forever ago, and Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques have graced my shelves for a very long time. However, it was the recent addition of Le Corbeau that convinced me that I had to add him to the list.

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Joel Schumacher: The Definitive Ranking

And so ends the work of one more filmmaker: the man who put nipples on the Batsuit.

I didn’t know what I was getting into when I decided to take on Joel Schumacher’s filmography. I’m not sure I was expecting something cohesive, but I did find some common themes. Ultimately, though, I found a filmmaker who was simply missing understanding of the needs of narrative. His best films feel like his work as no more than a studio director operating within very narrow guardrails while so much of ...

Trespass

Joel Schumacher’s final film before he was finally put into director’s jail (save for some television work, including a couple of episodes of House of Cards) was this star-studded, bottle-thriller that…no one seems to have seen. Looking at the budget, I’m shocked that it was nearly $40 million because this doesn’t look like it at all. Essentially one set for the vast majority of the runtime as people argue the same points over and over (and over) again, the money must have gone to its stars ...

Twelve

Joel Schumacher returns to his efforts to recreate Robert Altman one last time, but this time for Millennials instead of Gen-X like he had in St. Elmo’s Fire. However, where I found St. Elmo’s Fire largely antagonistic towards my viewing experience, I found Twelve to be mostly just…dull. There’s not a whole lot going on, and I think Schumacher realized during post-production that there were serious gaps in the film, necessitating a voiceover that, for all I know, could have been planned from...